British tourists describe fleeing for their lives from Rhodes wildfire: ‘It was hell on earth’

Tourists are forced to shelter in schools, stadiums and alternative hotels as wildfires engulf swathes of popular holiday destination

A mother who says she experienced “hell on earth” was among the British tourists forced to flee Rhodes this weekend as fierce wildfires continue to rip through the Greek holiday island.

Officials on the island, which sits southwest of Turkey in the Aegean Sea, launched Greece’s biggest-ever evacuation operation as the blaze tore through vast swathes of land, threatening resorts popular with holidaymakers.

Tourists were forced to shelter in schools, sports stadiums, airports and alternative hotels as firefighters desperately fought to contain the flames, which officials fear may worsen on Monday as wind speeds more than double on the island.

Tourists wait in Rhodes airport’s departure hall yesterday with evacuations under way (AFP via Getty)

As Britons rushed to book seats on packed flights home after the evacuations, holiday firms including Jet2, the UK’s biggest tour operator, announced they would be cancelling services to Rhodes and would be sending empty planes to bring stranded tourists home.

Airline easyJet said they would operate repatriation flights to bring home stranded British holidaymakers. Two rescue flights are scheduled on Monday and a third on Tuesday, they said.

Greek authorities also told people in some parts of Corfu to evacuate due to further wildfires on Sunday evening.

Around 19,000 people in total are reported to have been evacuated from Rhodes, the largest of Greece’s Dodecanese islands, which has a local population of about 115,000.

Smoke rises from a wildfire on the island of Rhodes (via REUTERS)

Becky Mulligan, a 29-year-old training manager from Leicester, was staying at the Princess Sun Hotel in the Kiotari resort on Rhodes’s southeast coast when she, her five-year-old daughter, and sister, 20, were forced to quickly pack their bags and flee as the sky turned “orange”.

“Smoke started coming up against the window of the hotel so we decided to run,” she told The Independent. “There were helicopters hovering above making the whole building shake.

“We ended up legging it down a dirt track as the smoke came up around our legs. I thought I was going to die. It was like hell on earth.”

Ms Mulligan and her family were forced to seek refuge on the beach as they waited for coaches to come and pick them up, which she described as the “most scary point”.

She said hundreds of people were waiting to be evacuated with grown adults “basically trampling on children to get to the buses”. The trio was then taken to Gennadi Grande resort and from there bussed to another location, where they were forced to spend Saturday night on the floor of a hotel room.

On Sunday morning they managed to escape safely, sharing a taxi with another family to the airport where their flight back to the UK was due to depart after 11pm.

Dan Jones, a sports teacher from Torquay, Devon, said he had to climb onto a fishing trawler with his sons on Saturday night, describing it as “the scariest moment in my entire life”, adding: “What brave boys.”

Ian Wakefield told Times Radio he spent the night in a school playground in Faliraki after being evacuated from his hotel in Pefki.

He said: “It didn’t really feel real – being in imminent danger of being burned to death. Between midnight and around 5am this morning we were going through an evacuation which was pretty chaotic.

“There were a lot of upset people and children who were understandably quite hysterical. It was all very confusing – the instructions from the hotel manager were unclear.

“You had to make your own choice in the end. I’ve had to leave quite a lot of luggage in the hotel.”

As fire crews struggled to contain the blazes and thick black smoke continued billowing into the sky, British holiday firms began cancelling flights to Rhodes, although some planes touched down on the island on Saturday night and early on Sunday morning despite the emergency.

Jet2 Holidays cancelled all flights to the island until 30 July and said it would send empty planes to bring stranded Britons home, while Tui said it would cancel all flights and holidays until Tuesday.

A man carries a child as they leave an area where a forest fire burns, on the island of Rhodes, Greece, Saturday, July (AP)

Thomas Cook later announced it had cancelled all holidays to Kiotari and Lardos – the areas of the island most at risk – until 31 July and would be in touch with customers to arrange “swift refunds”. It has also offered full refunds to customers due to depart for other parts of the island on Sunday and Monday who wish to cancel their trip.

But some holidaymakers suggested that operators should have cancelled flights to the island sooner.

Lowri Jones from Crymych, Pembrokeshire, Wales, described scenes of “chaos” at Rhodes Airport when she arrived there on Saturday night. The mother of one, 52, travelled to the Greek island with her thirteen year-old-daughter for a holiday.

“It was absolute pandemonium at the airport, with long queues of people trying to find out what coach they were,” she told The Independent. “We booked with Tui and there has been very little communication from them.

“We had been due to stay at the Atlantica Dreams hotel in Gennadi but were driven – without warning – to a completely different resort in the north of the island due to the wildfires.”

A burnt area is seen during a wildfire on the island of Rhodes (via REUTERS)

She added: “Me and my daughter ended up spending the night on the floor with other people in a room with no air conditioning in sweltering heat – it was horrible.

“To be honest, I don’t think we should have even been there in the first place. The flight was delayed because the pilot had to do a risk assessment to see if it was safe to land because of the fires.

“Tui should have told us it wasn’t safe and given us a refund – at least that way I could have made a decision about booking somewhere else. Now I’m stranded in Rhodes and having to look at booking flights home.”

A spokesperson for Tui said it is continuing to monitor the wildfires and appreciated the “distressing and difficult” situation for its customers.

Anyone who remains in Rhodes is urged “follow the advice of the local authorities who are managing tourist movements in impacted areas,” they said.

Britain’s ambassador to Greece said the Foreign Office had sent a “rapid deployment team” to help UK tourists who were among thousands forced to flee for their lives on Saturday as the wildfire spread.